Inside the Atari 800 By Benj Edwards

posted Nov 5, 2009, 8:34 PM by Troy Cheek

Thirty years ago, video game pioneer Atari released its first two
entrants in the home-computer market: the Atari 800 and 400 computers.
Originally retailing for $US1000, the Atari 800 shipped with 8KB of
RAM, upgradable to 48KB. Its little brother, the Atari 400, was priced
at $US550. The Atari 800 began as a next-generation follow-up to
Atari's groundbreaking Atari 2600 video game console. Upon seeing
Apple's success in the early personal computer market, Atari executives
ordered their engineers to turn the new hardware into a personal
computer system, which became the 800. To celebrate this anniversary,
let's peek inside this classic machine to examine its advantages and
drawbacks.